Morya
Hindu Girl. Muslim Boy. Everyone Has Opinions. They Have Love.
Three years, Meghna Khare has run the Ganesh Chaturthi installation in her building. Three years, Farhan Sayyed has turned up for every evening of it.
Nobody in that building has ever needed to ask why.
They work at the same agency. She rides pillion on his bike through Mumbai traffic. She has dressed in his mother’s bedroom and cooked in his mother’s kitchen since the first year. Both families stopped waiting for an announcement a long time ago.
The only two people who cannot see it are the two of them.
Then a woman on the second floor starts saying things at a volume designed to be deniable. She keeps saying them. The lane picks a side, and then another side, and what has been sitting quietly between Meghna and Farhan for three years is suddenly out where everybody can reach it.
Ten days of festival. One kiss in the rain, in front of everyone who has an opinion about it. And then the months after, when it turns out that saying it out loud was the easy part.
A slow-burn Mumbai love story about two people who were the last to know, and the one thing nobody could talk them out of.
Explicit. Warm. And an ending that stays.
A glimpse beneath the sheets…
Meghna Khare had run the Ganesh Chaturthi installation in her building for three years, and for three years Farhan Sayyed had turned up for every evening of it. They worked at the same agency. She rode pillion on his bike through Mumbai traffic. She dressed in his mother’s bedroom and cooked in his mother’s kitchen every Eid, and both families had long ago stopped waiting for an announcement.
The only two people who could not see it were the two of them.
On the first evening she guided his hands through the aarti, as she had the first year and the second and the third, which was two years past the point where he had needed guiding. And a woman on the second floor said, to nobody, at exactly the volume she used: “Three years he’s been coming. So much devotion. And I always wonder — for Bappa, is it?”
Meghna had an answer ready. She had been carrying it for three years.
Farhan’s fingers came to her elbow. “Jaane de. Not worth it. Not here.”
***
On the sixth evening the building lost power for forty minutes. They were on the stairwell landing between the third and fourth floors, and there was nowhere sensible to go in the dark except where they already were. Neither of them switched on a phone torch. Neither of them mentioned that neither of them had.
His hand found her elbow, the way it always did in a crowd. This time there was no crowd. There was the dark, and the two of them standing close enough that the back of that same hand lay against the bare skin at her waist where the kurta had ridden up.
Neither of them acknowledged it. Neither of them stepped back.
Forty minutes is a long time. It was long enough that she could hear him breathing and could tell, from the rhythm of it, that he was doing what she was doing, which was standing extremely still and thinking about a distance of four inches.
His thumb moved. Once. A centimetre, along the skin at her waist, and stopped. She did not move at all.
The power came back with a small city-wide sigh, and the landing filled with ordinary light, and he took his hand off her as though it had never been anywhere else.
“Farhan.”
“Aarti,” he said, and his voice wasn’t steady.
***
By the tenth evening the city had committed to it entirely.
The rain came down warm and heavy and sideways, and the saree was soaked through in minutes, and the dhol was not in her ears but in her chest. His hand found her elbow at a surge and didn’t let go when the surge passed, and somewhere in the next few minutes, without either of them marking it, it moved to the small of her back.
The bloc was eleven feet away. Wet and cheerful and carried along in the same crowd, and in the licence a crowd gives, at a volume that would have been unthinkable in a stairwell and was nothing at all out here:
“—three years, and now look. Look at where his hand is.”
“Her mother must be so proud.”
“Which mother? The one in Sangli or the one who’s already picked the dates?”
Laughter.
“That’s what happens. Girl lives alone, no father in the city. Then an outsider is at your aarti every evening and everyone must smile and say how nice while his hand is doing things it has no business doing—”
And then the word. Not the argument. The word, the one that has been used in this city to get men killed, said easily, in a crowd, in the rain, by a woman in a wet cotton saree with a garland still in her hand.
Meghna felt Farhan’s hand go flat against her back.
He didn’t move. He didn’t turn his head. He stood in the rain and took it, the whole of it, at eleven feet, and she watched him do it and understood all at once that he had been doing this for three years. That every time he had put his fingers on her elbow and said jaane de, he had not been protecting her from the sentence. He had been getting her to stop before she found out how many of them there were.
She turned to him. He was already looking at her, the way she had known for two years that he looked at her, every single time he had looked away instead.
“Don’t stop me today, Farhan.”
She took his jaw in her hand and kissed him.
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